‘The Addiction’: An Uncommonly Grim and Seductive Vampiric Tale

Since Bram Stoker’s Dracula kickstarted the popularity of the modern conception of the “vampire”, they have always been an instrument for metaphor. Whether it’s a story underpinned by explorations of sexuality, gender roles, immigration, disease/plague, or religion, the author always poses a deeper question, interpreted through the lens of the creature’s story. Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction is an intoxicating entry in the vampire canon. It is filled to the brim with anxious and grim throughlines about, you guessed it, addiction.

As much as I love horror movies that are all shock and awe, I’ll never scoff at one that takes its time, wears its anxieties on its sleeve, and isn’t afraid to take detours down weird, academic tangents on power, religion, and addiction. A slow-burn horror movie with broad philosophical themes and underpinnings is essentially evergreen. Even decades after its release, even after rewatch after rewatch, the film stays intellectually relevant and refreshing. On my latest watch, it brought to mind my recent revisit of Saint Maud, with its quiet, ominous dance toward destruction and its intensely foregrounded concepts. 

While the main memo of this film is the vampire’s curse interpreted as a pain and pleasure cycle of addiction and sin, it’s also completely anchored to the reality that Ferrara, his crew, and their community in New York was experiencing at that time. There is a sort of hallucinatory and rambling quality to the way these anxieties are excised and expressed: flashes and allusions of the AIDS crisis, failed, brutal wars and horrific acts of violence. The painful disease of drug addiction is as in your face as it gets in the text, but nonetheless completely effective and moving. The Addiction functions as a train of consciousness reflection on power and destruction as much as a vampire genre movie. These ideas are so intrinsically intertwined and in-conversation, though, that it doesn’t ever feel like any idea thrown at the wall is half-baked or secondary.

Ferrara and the scriptwriter, Nicholas St. John, immediately transcribe the questions the film is interested in exploring. Kathleen (Lili Taylor, The Conjuring), is a student working toward her Master’s degree, watching a presentation about a massacre during the Vietnam war, questioning the lack of consequences for those who enable people to commit such acts. Soon after, while walking down a dark street at night, she is bitten by a beautiful, mysterious woman. She tells Kathleen to tell her to go away, not request, a play on the typical rule-based architecture of the folklore. Instead of being punished and victimized for a vampire to come in, she is being taken due to a lack of concrete refusal. After biting her neck, the woman, with such an ambiguous tone, calls her a “collaborator.” She is not framed as a victim, but a newly-inducted member with the power to change those different from her.